How Bush factored into Pete Wilson's famous moment in the Senate

Associated Press

Then-Sen. Pete Wilson, R-Calif., is wheeled out of the Senate Chamber in 1985 after casting a key budget vote. Just over 24 hours earlier, Wilson had surgery for a ruptured appendix. Then-Vice President George Bush cast the tie-breaking vote on the controversial measure.

Then-Sen. Pete Wilson, R-Calif., is wheeled out of the Senate Chamber in 1985 after casting a key budget vote. Just over 24 hours earlier, Wilson had surgery for a ruptured appendix. Then-Vice President George Bush cast the tie-breaking vote on the controversial measure. (Associated Press)

George H. W. Bush played a key role in perhaps Pete Wilson’s most notable vote as a U.S. senator.

In May 1985, Wilson was rushed to Bethesda Naval Hospital, where he had an emergency appendectomy.

The next day, Wilson received a call from Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole.

“Pete, how are you feeling?” Dole asked Wilson.

He wasn’t just checking on Wilson’s personal welfare. Dole was in a bind. He was short of votes on a crucial deficit-reduction measure and wanted to see if Wilson was well enough to come to the Capitol and cast a decisive vote.

The California senator was supposed to be in the hospital for seven to 10 days, but he overrode the advice of his doctor and offered to come in.

A little more than 24 hours after his surgery, he was taken late at night by ambulance, then by gurney, then by wheelchair to the Senate floor. Clad in a brown bathrobe, with tubes in his arm and a tan blanket covering his legs, Wilson cast what turned out to be the tying vote on a measure to drastically reduce spending in the version of the bill by the Democratic-controlled House. A key reduction was in Social Security funding.

Bush, then vice president, was on hand to put the measure over the top.

“I gave the vice president the excruciating pleasure of casting the tie-breaking vote,” Wilson said with chuckle recently as he reflected on the passing of his longtime friend.

There was a bit of gallows humor about passing the bill. While Wilson, Bush, Dole and President Ronald Reagan strongly believed the deficit package was necessary — as did most Senate Republicans — they knew it would not be popular and that they could pay a political price. They did.

Wilson said the cuts contributed to Republicans losing the Senate majority to Democrats the following year. There were other factors that played into the election results but the Social Security cut was “a key campaign issue,” said Wilson, who was not up for re-election in 1986.

When Wilson was mayor of San Diego, he said he did not know Bush particularly well. But that changed when the vice president and his wife, Barbara Bush, came to California to campaign for Wilson when he ran for the Senate in 1982.

“That was the beginning of a really great friendship,” Wilson said in the recent interview.

After Wilson was elected governor in 1990, Bush came out to California on various occasions early in Wilson’s first term. But both eventually became preoccupied with a bad economy and severe budget problems at the state and national levels.

Sean Walsh worked as a communications official for Bush when he was both vice president and president, and later became a top aide to Gov. Wilson. He became close to the Bush family and joined them regularly at the Camp David presidential retreat. During the occasional holiday there, Walsh and other staff were invited to take part in family sports competitions and gatherings.

He said Bush had the mettle to do what he thought was right, even if wasn’t always the best decision politically. Walsh said Bush believed breaking of his famous pledge — “Read my lips: no new taxes” — would hurt him in the long run, but that the alternative was unacceptable given the nation’s finances.

“It probably cost him the presidency, but he thought that was the right thing to do,” said Walsh, who continues to work with Wilson at the consulting firm Wilson Walsh George Ross.

Bush would sometimes show his emotional side, Walsh said, particularly when it came to the military and those who died serving their country. Walsh said it bothered the president when he let his emotions get the best of him. Walsh found it admirable.

“Some thought that was a weakness, but that’s an absolute pillar in my view,” he said.

After a gun turret explosion killed 47 crew members on the battleship Iowa in 1989, Walsh said the president struggled while delivering a speech about the loss. “He kind of broke down,” Walsh said.

Chriss Winston, chief White House speechwriter at the time, recently told National Public Radio that the emotional high point of the speech was a line about the president’s own experience as a Navy pilot during World War II, taking off in the morning and coming back to an empty deck.

He couldn’t deliver the line and skipped over it in his prepared text, she said.

It wasn’t Bush’s emotions, but rather questions about whether he could be a strong leader coming out of Reagan’s shadow that led to the Newsweek cover story: “Fighting the ‘Wimp Factor.’”

Bush considered it the “cheapest shot” of his political career and his supporters bristle about it to this day.

“He was a decent, selfless patriot,” Wilson said, ticking off his many other roles as a public servant: congressman, United Nations ambassador, CIA director, envoy to China.

The editor of the Newsweek story has since said using the term was a mistake and, as Bush proved by raising taxes and leading an international coalition in war, wrong.

In his post-presidency, Bush continued to show his fortitude, Walsh said. There were big things, like teaming up with the man who ended his presidency and eventually became his friend, Bill Clinton, to advance national and global aid initiatives; and little ones, such as when he shaved his head in solidarity with the leukemia-stricken son of a Secret Service agent.

Bush, a longtime hunter and NRA member, said he had backed the organization’s gun training and support of gun ownership.

“However, your broadside against Federal Agents deeply offends my own sense of decency and honor; and it offends my concept of service to country. It directly slanders a wide array of government law officials, who are out there, day and night, laying their lives on the line for all of us,” he wrote the NRA in a letter released publicly.

In the next paragraph, he announced his resignation from the organization.